Twitter Tattoos From the Social Tattoo Project 2011-08-10 12:00:56

Would You Let Twitter Decide What Tattoo You Got?

Want to have the fate of your tattoo in someone else's hands? Check out the Social Tattoo Project, then. Every week, the Project asks its Twitter and Facebook followers to vote for one of four trending Twitter topics about politics or social justice, and then a volunteer gets a tattoo about the topic — hashtag and all. The volunteers don't find out what their tattoo is about until their new piece is finished, either. It's sort of like global issues Russian roulette.

So why are people doing this? "Someone's empathy can expire," says cocreator Jenn Huang. "If you ask someone now what's happening in Haiti they probably couldn't tell you, so we came up with a social experiment where we make empathy permanent by tattooing volunteers." The tattoos so far have been #humantrafficking, #Haiti, #Norway, #poverty, and #Japan. Would you ever consider volunteering for a socially sourced tattoo? (All of the tattoo recipients have seemed pretty happy with their ink so far.) To see all five of the tattoos, just keep reading.